Creating high quality in-person customer service is not an easy task, as past efforts to improve customer service demonstrate. The customer experience in most retail stores has largely been in the same condition for decades. When customers need to ask something, even just a simple product location question, they typically have to walk around the store to track down a store representative, who may be assisting another customer, and the customer thus must sometimes wait for assistance. Further, it is not uncommon that such a representative cannot provide the desired assistance, as it would be nearly impossible to memorize and keep track of what can sometimes be tens of thousands or more different items in the store. In part due to the prevalence of online or e-commerce shopping, today's customers expect to have everything at their fingertips, instantly available to them, and the current state of the shopping experience in physical locations fails to meet these expectations. Physical stores are also scattered everywhere in a disconnected manner, and while when combined, they likely have more manpower than e-commerce competitors, they are not united and sorely under-utilized at different times of the day. There are many types of known service robots; however, such robots are not well-suited for retail or customer service purposes, and thus are generally inefficient, unproductive, unattractive and otherwise less than desirable.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.